Condé Nast Buys Wired News — Lycos is selling its Wired News unit to Condé Nast Publications for $25 million, Lycos parent Daum Communications announced in Korea late Tuesday, a deal that brings Wired.com and Wired magazine under the same owner after an eight-year separation.

Microsoft hit with 280m euro fine — Microsoft has been fined 280.5m euros ($357m; £194m) by the European Commission for failing to comply with an anti-competition ruling. — The software giant will appeal against the fine which follows a long-running dispute between it and EU regulators.

Park the Beamer by Bot — Driving your car into a cramped parking space can be a harrowing experience, but BMW says it has developed a robotic parking system to solve the problem. — The luxury carmaker's parking-assist technology will park your car for you as you stand outside and watch …

Time Warner Expects Offering AOL Free Will Be Costly — Time Warner Inc. expects its AOL unit to sacrifice nearly $1 billion of operating profit through 2009 under a proposed plan to offer the online service free of charge to some customers, according to internal company forecasts.

Samsung Z5 Speaker Docking Station … The Samsung YA-DS100 Z5 Speaker Dock (£59.99) is currently Out Of Stock — All prices include VAT — This product is currently expected to arrive in stock on Wednesday 16 August, 2006. You can still purchase this product now …

Spy Camera Sunglasses Records What You See — It's amazing to see the lengths that people will go to snoop on their fellow man. These sunglasses promise to record exactly what you're looking at thanks to a built-in video camera. The camera, which uses MPEG4 to encode video, has a 92-degree field-of-view.

This Is a Computer on Your Brain — A new brain-computer-interface technology could turn our brains into automatic image-identifying machines that operate faster than human consciousness. — Researchers at Columbia University are combining the processing power of the human brain …

Rather eyeing online gig — AOL might have a new message for the Internet: You've got Dan. — The Time Warner-owned Internet company is in negotiations with representatives for veteran CBS anchor Dan Rather to play a role in original programming for its online video offerings, sources said.

Crazy-Long Hacker Sentence Upheld — A federal appeals court upheld a nine-year prison term Monday for a hacker who tried and failed to steal customer credit-card numbers from the Lowe's chain of home improvement stores. — Brian Salcedo, now 23, has been in custody since 2003 …

How Washington will shape the Internet — The Web was the Wild West - until the sheriff rode into town — Michael Rogers — The most potent force shaping the future of the Internet is neither Mountain View's Googleplex nor the Microsoft campus in Redmond.

MySpace may face legislative crackdown — Politicians on Tuesday accused MySpace.com and other social-networking sites of failing to protect minors from sexual predators and other malign influences and said a legislative crackdown may be necessary. — During a hearing before a House …

Yahoo! (not MySpace) is still Web traffic leader by most measures — Yesterday, reports came out late in the afternoon that Hitwise, Internet traffic measurement firm, has placed MySpace.com, the social networking web site, as the number one American web site, accounting for 4.46% of all U.S. Internet visits for the previous week.

Akamai Sues Limelight Networks — In the words of Yogi Berra, its like déjà vu all over again. Back in the first Internet bubble, we were all entertained and amused by legal wranglings of various content delivery networks. For a while it was all quiet, but the fireworks are starting again.

G9 plays joker, but Telstra has trump — THE Group of Nine's proposal for a national broadband upgrade isn't, as many have interpreted it, a serious bid to build a new fibre-to-the-node (FTTN) network. Telstra will never let that happen. — Nor is there any realistic chance that the consortium …